~ Australasian ~

NUMBER 128 OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 1988 lfO cents

Hawke's Cold War Reaction Fuels

The current ruling class "de­bate" over Asian immigration is stirring to the surface all the ugly and vicious white racism that is at the foundation of Australian capi­talist society. Columnist Mike Steketee summarised: "Like it or not, race is stirring up a potent brew in Australian politics. Asian immigration has become such a major concern that it can no longer be ignored; Japanese in­vestment in Australia has trigger­ed a bout of ugly xenophobia; and community sentiment seems to have swung against Australia IS

original inhabitants" (Sydney Morning Herald, 17 June).

The limits set to the debate are narrow - whether the current small intake of Asian immigrants, about 50,000 last year, is too few or too many to provide the necessary "protective coloration II ,while keeping Australia over­whelmingly white. Its terms are thoroughly racist, all the talk of juggling the numbers of refugees,

y , urore • • •

Sian mmlar I

Stone, Howard and Hawke (left to right). The bosses' "One Australia" rallying cry targets Asi.ans and all those they consider not "true blue" Australians - most of the population!

family reunions, skilled and business immigrants just a thin disguise for a racial criterion. The debate is dripping with hypocrisy, describing the current policy under which it is many times easier for applicants from Britain to be accepted than those from

Asia as "non-discriminatory," and laden with hysteria. In fact only 3.7 percent of the population were born in Asia including the Middle East a geographic entity stretching from the Bosphorus to the Bering Strait and lumping to­gethersome 2.5 billion people. The jingoistic Bicentennial was supposed to exhibit Australia as a liberal, "multi-cultural" democ­racy; beneath the veneer this "debate" has put on show all the racism that is, as the motto of the old Sydney Bulletin once proudly proclaimed, "offensively Australian. II

the English Queen). "We can I t keep bringing in Lebanese who ha ve been told I You don I t have to die to go to paradise, there I s a place called Australia where you don I t ha ve to wor k and the Government will pay you I. II And there's a place called Canberra where fat-cat academics are paid astronomical sums to write reports retailing such bar-room racist trash.

Fitzgerald I s ball was picked up by hapless Liberal Party leader John Howard, in a desperate bid to boost the opposition coalition IS

sagging electoral fortunes. Forti­fied by a handshake from Marg­aret Thatcher, in August the whining Tory nerd launched a new immigration policy which said they would alter the mix of immigration in the interests of protecting "social cohesion. II Translation: less Asians. For once, briefly, Howard seemed to be on a winner : one newspaper poll claimed 77 percent support for less Asian immigrants. But in the blink of an eye the issue split the Tory opposition. National front-bencher John Stone was sacked for saying out loud the new policy meant less Asians, and a gaggle of Liberal "Wets" crossed the floor in parliament on the issue.

Howard has broken the hal­lowed "bipartisan consensus" on immigration . because Hawke I s right-wing Labor government has occupied all the traditional Tory territory, and then some •.

Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme, buH t by immigrant labour in post-war period. Brutal conditions meant high death and injury tolls.

It started with the govern­ment-commissioned report on immigration by Dr Stephen Fitz­gerald, Whitlam I s appointment as the first ambassador to the Peoples RepUblic of China. He ar­gued for preserving the bourgeois consensus on immigration by ap­peasing the anti-Asian backlash­less refugees and family reunions, more English speakers, skilled workers and businessmen - while retaining "non-racial" selection criteria. He also attacked the official doctrine of "mul ti­culturalism" as divisive and professed "a certain sympathy for the average Australian who sees the concept of multi-culturalism being thrust down his throat" (Australian, 4-5 June). And he demanded social security pay­ments be cut to those who do not take out Australian citizenship (through swearing allegiance to

Haw.ke/Keating have successfully policed the working class and have impeccable relations with the US Pentagon and State Department. And in seeking to exploit racism for electoral advantage, Howard is walking a path already well­trodden by Hawke I s ALP, with its jingoistic Cold War appeals for "national unity," attacks on mi'­grants and Aboriginals. Hawke sanctimoniously pontificated that he I d rather lose an election than "compromise on the question of discrimina tion, II which is hardly necessary, since his governm~nt has been quietly instructing Immi­gration to do exactly what

Continued on page four

Registered by Austral ia Post - Publ ication no NBF0710

Delend Women's Right to Abortion I On Saturday 20 August the

Spartacist League marched in a lOOO-strong demonstration in Sydney organised by Women's Abortion Action Campaign to op­pose attacks on abortion rights. With spirited chants we linked the fight for women's right to abor­tion to the fight against attacks on child care, health care, wages and jobs. Our placards included, "Free Abortion on Demand ~" "Free 24-Hour Child Care ~ Free (:uali ty Heal thCare for All ~"

I Anti-Soviet War 8ri ve means Social Reaction at Home ~ Defend the Soviet Union and Vietnam~" and "For Workers Action to De­fend Women, Gays, Aboriginals and Migrants!"

The demonstration protested two anti-abortion bills drafted for the NSW Parliament. Fred Nile's draconian Unborn Child Protec­tion Bill proposes three-year jail terms for women who have abor­tions, and 14-year sentences for doctors who perform them. Liberal MP Guy Yeomans' Ter­mination of Pregnancy Restriction Bill would shut down· abortion clinics. With the public hospital system verging on collapse, the long queues and high costs would force many women into higher­risk, late-term abortions, to con­tinue with unwanted pregnancies, or into the potentially deadly hands of backyard abortionists. Nile's bill is unlikely to succeed, but the ALP's reactionary Cath­olic right-wingers will exercise a "conscience vote" for Yeomans' "softer option."

Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky denounced abortion bans as "a foul police interference in what is to every Woman the most intimate sphere of life" (The Revolution

SPARTACIST CLASS SERIES I RETURN TO THE ROAD OF

LENIN AND TROTSKY!

SYDNEY UNIVERSITY Ipm, Oct 5 and Oct 19

Meet at Spartacist literature table outside Fisher Library.

AustraIasian-_;-----

[SpARTACIST ~)

2

Marxist two-monthly of the Spartacist League of Australia and New Zealand, section of the international Spartacist tendency. Editorial Board: Greg Blythe, (editor) Linda Brooke, Doug Flynn, Andrew Giannakis, Sandra Morris Circulation: Jenny Klein Production: Phillipa Newman Printed by trade union labour. Registered at GPO, Sydney for posting as a publication -­Category B. Subscription $3 for 6 issues; overseas airmail $7 for 6 issues. Address all correspondence to: Spartacist ANZ Publishing Co, GPO Box 3473, Sydney, NSW, 2001. Opinions expressed in signed articles or letters do not necessarily express the edi torial viewpoint. Printed by Spot press Pty Ltd, 21 Ross St, Glebe.

Betrayed). In this viciously male­chauvinist country abortion has always been illegal except when a doctor certifies a woman's health to be in serious danger. In the Whitlam period women won some gains, including a liberal interpretation of abortion laws. Today women can get abortions easily in most big cities. But in Cold War II women's rights are under attack. In 1985 Queensland cops executed Gestapo-style raids on abortion clinics in Townsville and Greenslopes, Brisbane, seizing over 19,000 personal medical files and charging doctors with conspiracy to use force to procure abortions. The charges were thrown out of court - after the damage was done. Right-to-Life reactionaries have targetted abortion clinics, regularly picket­ing Sydney's Preterm Clinic and the Bessie Smith Foundation in Homebush. The Preterm Clinic has hired full-time armed guards to protect its patients and staff. What's needed is a massive mobil­isation of labour, women and minori ties to run these bib1e­thu m ping bigots out of town!

Spartacist contingent marching in Sydney rally to protest reactionary anti-abortion bills, 20 August.

Nile's Call to Australia Party, with a program of domestic drudgery for women and the ban­ning of all "promotion" of homo­sexuality, holds balance of power in the NSW Upper House between the governing Liberal Party and the Opposition Labor Party. That reactionary filth like Fred Nile, who calls AIDS "god's retribution on homosexuals" are in parliament is a sharp expression of the right­wing climate of Cold War II. Hawke's Labor government has rolled back democratic rights across the board, with austeri ty and union-busting for the working

class and vicious attacks on women and minorities. Under Keating and "left" Social Security Minister Howe, social services including sole parent benefits and youth unemployment benefits have been slashed. Women have been driven out of work, and the limited gains of the '70s are under attack, among them child­care centres and women's refuges, often the last recourse for women in a country where wife and child-beating are a "normal" part of life. In this white racist enclave Aboriginal women are often unknowingly sterilised after child-birth, and the Queens­land government injects black women with Depo-Provera with­out their consent. Depo-Provera is a long-term contraceptive with devastating side effects including sterility, diabetes, haemorrhaging and intense pain. The state also

~~artacist League Forum

Delend Vietnaml MELBOURNE, 22 September: The Spartacist League (SL) today held a well-attended forum at LaTrobe University entitled "Vietnam to pull out of Kampuchea. US/ Australia/ ASEAN Hands Off Vietnam!" Included within the audience of over 20 people were supporters of the SL and trade unionists. We were prepared to ensure the proper conduct and de­fence of the meeting against the threat of attack by Vietnamese fascists, who in 1985, given the green light by Hawke's Cold War Labor government, rampaged around the country attacking left events (including those organised by the SL) celebrating the lath anniversary of the heroic Viet­namese Revolution.

Various Cold War social demo­crats, an NCCer and a Liberal were amongst the audience. One Hawke-lover revealed his utter contempt for the heroic struggles of the Vietnamese working masses when he grotesquely tried to make an amalgam between the struggle of the Indochinese working masses to defeat brutal and murderous US and Australian imperialism, and the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge geno-

cide in Kampuchea. As SL speakers pointed out: Pol Pot killed the real Khmer communists, then committed genocide! It has taken great sacrifice from Vietnam to rid Kampuchea of the horrendous Pol Pot regime. Tragi­cally, the liberation of Kam­puchea's peoples is threatened by Gorbachev's treacherous pressure on Vietnam to pull out. What Cold War Laborites have to swallow is that Pol Pot's brutal Khmer Rouge is on their side as US/ Australia/ ASEAN' s key Cold War proxy in the counterrevolutionary war qgainst Kampuchea and Vietnam.

The Vietnam question cuts very deep in this white imperialist enclave. Not only is it the ques­tion of the defence of historic working class gains in this region but the Vietnamese Revolution places an explosive charge under the White Australia "monolith." Today as the Hawke government's anti-Soviet war drive breeds vicious White Australia racism and targets blacks, Asians and other minorities, it is critical to mount hard class struggle against the government. As Andrew

administers this drug to teenage girls locked in reformatories for "promiscuity." Deep sexual re­pression is enforced by capitalist society to maintain the stultifying insti tution of the nuclear famify and to reinforce generalised sub­mission to bourgeois class rule.

The Hawke Labor govern­ment's attacks on working people and the oppressed are mandatea by a ruling class striving to bolster its profits and regiment the population as it pursues its mad drive to anti-Soviet war. Only a planned collectivised econ­omy can lay the basis for the liberation of women. Our fight for free, safe abortion on demand is integrally linked to our fight for a revolutionary labour movement which will champion the struggle of all the oppressed. For women's liberation through socialist revolution! •

Swainston, the Spartacist League spokesman concluded:

"Class conscious workers understand, if you can't de­fend the gains already made, you can't make new ones. The only way to defend the Soviet Union and Vietnam is to fight to extend socialist revolution internationally - to defeat imperialism over and over again. For us in the Australian section of the international Spartacist tendency the struggle begins right here, again~t our own imperialism.".

AUSTRALASIAN SPART ACIST

South Korea's Police • State Olympics Labour, Students Defy

US Puppet Regime On September 1, South Korean

soldiers armed with semi-auto­matic rifles escorted the Olympic torch into the city of Kwangju on its way to the site of the up­coming games in the capital of Seoul. Student protesters were all the more outraged because Kwangju was the site of the 1979 massacre in which hundreds were mowed down by South Korean units which had been withdrawn from the border with North Korea and replaced by the US Army.

In recent months the US­backed police state has been shaken by massive workers' strikes and student protests. To secure social peace the generals are pre­paring for the Olympics as for war. A force of 120,000 police and soldiers has been mobilized under the pretext of "anti-terrorism" to "protect" the games. A special commando unit has been formed consisting of sharpshooters also trained in the more deadly martial arts. The right-wing US News & World Report quipped:-..with Korean security on a hair trigger, fans might want to think twice before leaping up to cheer the ho,ne team - or suddenly reaching for a stick of gum."

The entire 600,000-man South Korean army as well as the 40,000 US troops stationed there will be placed on full alert during the games. A squadron of US fighter planes has been moved from Japan to Korea, a US Navy carrier task force will patrol offshore and AWACS aircraft will be flying overhead. The North Korean regime (which has refused to par­ticipate in the Seoul Olympics) rightly called the games "undisguised war maneuvers."

To hold the Olympics in Seoul is itself a Cold War provocation. For it was on the Korean penin-

'}. ...••..•• ; .""'." .S·

sula in 1950 that the Cold War turned into a hot war. It was here that US imperialism moved to "roll back Communism," begin­ning with North Korea, only to be stopped by the Chinese Army backed by the Soviet Union. The American Caesar, Douglas MacArthur, suffered the most humiliating defeat of his career when the Chinese Red Army crossed the Yalu and smashed the US Eighth Army. In response MacArthur wanted to bomb China. US president Harry Truman vetoed this move, fearing it would trigger World War III by provoking Russia. Ever since the 1953 truce, the totally militarized Korean peninsula - divided between the "free world" military dictatorship in the South and the grotesquely deformed workers state in the North - has been a trip wire for World War III.

For decades anyone in South Korea who even spoke of re­unification risked imprisonment, torture and assassination. But today popular sympat!1y for re­unification, spearheaded by the militant student protests, is so intense that even the US puppet regime of Roh Tae Woo is paying lip service to it. In July Roh an­nounced an opening to the North, permi tting trade, family visi ts and student exchanges. In late August South Korean politicians and North Korean bureaucrats met at the Korean War truce village of Panmunjom, but their talks went nowhere.

The notion that reunification can be achieved peacefully under the banner of "democracy" is a liberal nationalist pipe dream. The national and social liberation of the Korean people requires revol­utionary reunification - prolet­arian socialist revolution against

Combative South Korean proletariat has the power to ovenhrow Cold War police state.

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 1988

Guardians of "free world" military dictatorship in South Korea.

the Cold War neocolony in the South, proletarian political revol­ution against the Stalinist regime in the North. SOUTH KOREAN WORKING CLASS SHOW S ITS POW ER

For decades South Korea has been ruled by a succession of gen­erals trained and selected by the Pentagon. Following last year's month-long labor and student revolt, the military regime in Seoul has taken on a parliamen­tary facade. A majority in the impotent National Assembly is now held by liberal opposition parties led by Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam. While the feud­ing Kims don't like one another, both are currently on amicable terms with President Roh, who was trained for the job at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and later with the US forces ravaging Viet­nam. The so-called "democra­tization" of Sout:1 Korea is pure hype. With its weak native bourgeoisie, its huge and combat­ati ve proletariat and radical student movement, this Cold War front line state can exist only as a military dictatorship (open or dis­guised) or it won't exist at all.

In addition to heralding its phony "democratization," propa­gandists for US imperialism point to South Korea as a great success story of "free enterprise" capitalism. But the South Korean

:;:: "economic miracle" is based on ~ subjecting workers to the highest ~ rate of exploitation in the indus-

trial world. An American liberal who visited a Seoul factory last year wrote to the New York Times (5 January): -- ---

"Condi tions were reminiscent of the 19th-century Lawrence, Mass., textile mills. Teen-ag~ women, recent arrivals from the countryside, work 13-hour days, 6-day weeks, for 65 cents an hour. They live in hostels above the factories, 10 to a room, returning half their wages to the American-owned company for 'room' and meals."

Business Week points cut that Sou-th-Koreans work over the course of a year 40 percent more hours than Americans and 25 per­cent rT'')re hours than Japanese. At the same time, South Korea's industrial plant, heavily financed by American and Japanese capital, is among the world's most advanced. The result is

bloated profits for the chaebols­the huge state-sponsored--mono­polies like Hyundai, Daewoo and Samsung - and their Wall Street and Tokyo backers.

Until last year independent trade unions in South Korea were effecti vel y suppressed. The only legal unions were cOlnpany unions under the umbrella of the state­sponsored Federation of Korean Trade Unions, which enforced labor discipline hand in glove with company goons, the KCIA spy agency and riot police. This cor­poratist straitjacket was ripped apart by a massive strike wave centering on the notoriously re­actionary Hyundai empire (see "South Korea: Strikes Shake Dictatorship," WV No 435, 4 September 1987)-. -

Again this spring a strike wave involving over a thousand separate industrial actions shook the chaebols. The core of the South Korean industrial proletariat went out - auto workers at Hyundai and Daewoo, shipbuilders at Sam sung. At H yundai Precision and Industry Co strikers held eleven executives, including the founder's son, hostage in the company compound for seven days. Throughout South Korea workers took on the kudasan, the bosses' paid goons and---strike­breakers.

The strikes ended with wage increases averaging 20 percent. Even the Wall Street Journal conceded that the chaebols-could easily absorb the additional labor costs. Profits are expected to in­crease by 30 percent this year, while South Korean companies routinely achieve double-digit gains in labor productivity. Never­theless, the Korean bourgeoisie and their imperialist overlords have to be nervous about the emergence of a combative and independently organized prolet­ariat. They are sitting atop a volcano.

Imperialist agencies are work­ing overtime to co-opt and control the new South Korean unions. Thus last winter the AFL-CIO sponsored "craining sessions" for union leaders at various South Korean universities. The AFL-CIO bureaucracy is notorious as an ins­trument for CIA-backed inter­vention to smash labor militancy throughout the American empire - while pushing racist, anti-Asian

Continued on page ten

3

Immigration ••• Continued from page one

'"­w -'

'"->-

Howard and Fitzgerald advocate. -D

Howard's new line didn't go down ~

so well amongst sections of the .~ Liberals' traditional big business 0

base: such racist populism could ~ be bad for business in Asia and ~ Hawke is doing the job anyway. c::

o Howard cries "One Australia!" +­

Hawke replies that's what the five :;:; years of his government have been ~ all about. Just so. Make no mis- ~ take, to the extent the ruling :;: class is having a debate, it's 8 about how best to enforce White ,;: Australia. "One Australia" is a catchphrase for racist reaction, reminiscent of Hitler's "One Germany!" This "debate" has served to dispel liberal taboos and bring overt racism back into the poli tical mainstream. Racist pigs like Ruxton and Ron Casey are almost respectable now. Various far-right outfits have crawled out of the woodwork, including the fascist National Action, which has targets ranging from leftists to the Uniting Church in Sydney and conservative financial journalist Maximilian Walsh. There has been a rise in violent attacks on Asians, including students and Japanese tourists. The organised workers movement must be mobilised to defend Asians against racist at­tacks and crush the incipient fas­cist groups in the egg!

The bourgeoisie has staked its economic future on "enmeshing" wi th the faster-growing econom­ies of Southeast Asia. It knows tha t returning to an openly racist immigration policy would get in the way. Already, reacting to the current "debate," the Japanese government has told banks to ease off on Australian property in­vestment; Hong Kong yuppies are looking for better places to em­igrate to, and so on. On the other hand, Australia's rulers are ter­rified of Japan's emergence as economic king-pin of the Pacific, rivalling the US which is their political/ mili tary lifeline. From the Philippines to Fiji the region

Spartacist League

GPO Box 3473, GPO Box 2339, Sydney, 2001 Melbourne, 3001 Ph: 281-2181 Ph: 654-4315

Correction The conclusion of our article,

"Vietnam to Pull out of Kampu­chea" in the previous issue (Australasian Spartacist no 127, August/September 1988) con­tained a stupid error, which read: "Ultimately, not only in Vietnam, Kampuchea and Laos, but also in China, the construction of social­ism requires prole tar ian revolu­tion in the advanced West - the US, Japan and Australia." And further on we stated, "The pre­condi tion for socialist revolution in the capitalist West, as well as for proletarian political revolution in the deformed workers states of the East, is the building of inter­na tionalist, Trotskyist parties forged in the struggle for the rebirth of the Fourth Inter­national, world party of socialist revolution." Jap?n of course is an advanced capitalist giant, but of the East, not the West. We apologise to our readers.

4

Migrant groups protest against cutbacks to English-teaching programs, part of Hawke/Keating's austerity drive.

continent for ourselves and our descendants unless we greatly in­crease our numbers." From 1947 to 1973 immigration was directly or indirectly responsible for 59 percent of popUlation growth. The ruling class also had to come to terms with the newly independent, US-backed Asian regimes to the north and the crude and offensive racism of the White Australia pol­icy became more and more em­barrassing. This was highlighted in cases like the brutal 1965 deport­ation of a five-year-old Fijian Indian girl, Nancy Prasad, as a "prohibited immigrant," to a chorus of protest. In 1966 the Liberal Holt government expunged overt racism from immigration law, permitting a small number of non-European immigrants if they fulfilled the requirements of a strict points system, based on language, job skills, age and money. This was purely cosmetic, never intending to admi t any large number of Asians. Nonetheless, even with the door only slightly ajar, Asian minorities have es­tablished themselves in the larger cities, where they provide a vis­ible target for the racist backlash. But for the working class they can be a valuable link to its class brothers and sisters of the region.

is increasingly unstable and more difficult for the arrogant white imperialists to police. The Aust­ralian bourgeoisie is gripped by anti-Soviet war fervour and de­termined to push ahead with their anti-working class economic "rationalisation." Their "One Australia" assimilationist war cry demands submission, order, coercion. It is the ideological spearhead of a fearful ruling class whose response to the increasing "threats" around them is inten­sified belligerence at home and abroad. Cold War racism, in the guise of "na tional consensus," serves the bourgeoisie to divide and conquer its working class. The fight against White Australia racism is inseparable from class struggle defence of the USSR and Vietnam!

White Australia capitalism mirrors the racialist states of Apartheid South Africa and Zion­ist Israel, except that its "blacks/ Arabs" are the masses of Asia and separated from it by hundreds of miles of ocean. All attempts to maintain Australia as a privileged white outpost in con­flict with the surrounding region are not only reactionary but his­torically doomed. Geographic and economic reali ty dictate that one day the population will be many times larger, and of mainly Asian descent. The only progressive way this can happen is through social­ist revolution to expropriate the White Australia bourgeoisie. Rev­olutionary Marxists recognise that to call for "open borders" under capitalism would be a utopian de­mand. Free movement of people will occur only after the triumph of socialism internationally, when the nation state, and therefore borde~ and immigration laws, will have disappeared. We do not ad­vise capitalist governments on their necessarily chauvinist and exploi tative immigration policies. But we aggressively oppose the White Australia immigration laws and all forms of racially and nationally discriminatory quotas, and defend the rights of migrant workers - "legal" or not - against

LaTrobe Uni 1 pm, Thursday, 6 October Meeting Room, Union Building Latrobe Uni

chauvinist persecution and de­portation. We demand full citizen­ship rights for all foreign-born working people who have managed to make it into the country!

HISTORY OF GENOCIDE, RACIAL EXCLUSION

The foundation stones of Aust­ralian capitalism were firstly, the bloody massacre and dispossession of the Aboriginals, the exploit­ation of whose lands was the basis of its wealth; secondly, the driv­ing out and exclusion of Asian and Pacific Island labour and forging the federation of the settler col­onies as an outpost of the Bri tish Empire. From the pogroms on the goldfields in the 1860s to the anti­Chinese immigration laws to the "Whites Only" clauses in the craftist trade unions, all doors were progressively closed to the Chinese and other non-Europeans. A t various times, especially in the tropics, Chinese and other Asians constituted a significant part of the workforce that built this country rail way workers, miners, shearers etc, who fought their own strikes, mostly unchron­icled, against the racist bosses and exclusionist white unions. But after the 1901 Immigration Re­stri<;:tion Act, the infamous "White Australia policy," this country was hermetically sealed off against Asians for over fifty years. Prospective immigrants were required to pass the notori­ous "dictation test" in whatever European language that an immi­gration official saw fit to pre­scribe, until 1958. This was complemented in 1907 by the de­portation of most of the Pacific Islanders who had been brought to work the cane fields under "inden­ture" - ie, slavery.

After the scare of World War II, which the Australian bour­geoisie fought as a racialist war against Japan, Labor Immigration Lvlinister Cal well motivated the post-war European immigration scheme under the slogan "Popu­late or Perish" and said: "we can­not continue to hold our island

Melbourne

In the 1970s the official policy of "assimilation" of imrnigrants gave way to "multiculturalism." The harsh racist reality remained unchanged - exclusion of all bOut a few Asians, apartheid oppression of Aboriginals, and concentration of immigrants at the bottom of society, doing the dirtiest and hardest jobs, first to suffer from the ever-increasing cuts to basic social services.

TERROR FOR TOURISTS

A t the borders and airports, the W hi te Australia policy re­mains the reality, as recent atroc­ity stories illustrate. The navy and coast guard wage a constant war on Indonesian fishermen, who are picked up, interned and their boats confiscated. A Thai female tourist was strip-searched by Cus­toms, jailed for nine days, sub­jected to "ocker" racist and sexist abuse by customs officials and denied access to friends. A Brazil­ian commercial agent visiting his niece was seized at Sydney airport, questioned for hours and deported next morning while his niece waited anxiously at the air­port. An Egyptian-born American medical specialist denounced customs officials as "flagrant racists" after they searched his baggage and accused him of being a possible carrier of foot and mouth disease. Those who make it past zealous customs and immi­gration officials but remain "illegal" are chased up by cops and sent to virtual concentration camps such as Villawood and

Sydney 2 pm, Saturday, 15 October 7 pm, Saturday, 22 October Room 1, YWCA Room 5, 2nd floor, YWCA 489 Elizabeth Street, Cnr Wentworth Ave and Melbourne Liverpool Streets, Sydney

For more information phone: Spartacist League Sydney (02) 2&1 21&1 or Melbourne (03) 6544315.

AUSTRALASIAN SPARTACIST

.. Ox I ey Library

Kanak cane-cutters, virtually slaves, in North Queensland (above). Anti-Chinese massacre by diggers on the goldfields (right). Last century saw Australia built on the blood and sweat of coloured labour­later deported as Australia became a "nation."

Maribyrnong detention centres, where they can be interned with­out trial indefinitely.

The Cold War Hawke govern­ment has cracked down on "illegals" and refugees from right­ist terror regimes. Right now, seven Tamils await deportation to Sri Lanka, their appeals for asylum ignored, where they face torture and execution at the hands of the vicious Sinhala-chauvinist regime of Hawke's Cold War ally, Jayewardene. The red-carpet treatment of Soviet-bloc "defect­ors" makes a glaring contrast. They are welcomed as "refugees from communist tyranny." After World War II, the Labor govern­ment gave orders that Jewish refugees were to comprise no more than 25 percent of each ship-load of immigrants, whilst East European fascist war criminals were assured first class passage. Following the Vietnam war, the CIA twisted the Fraser government's arms to take in the Vietnamese "boat people," amongst whom were certified war criminals and US and Australian collaborators. The largest group

Its racial xenophobia about Asia has condemned weak Aust­ralian imperialism .to a lackey's existence, the price of protection first by the British then the American empires. Today the Australian ruling class needs the US spy/communications bases and wants to be in the front line of war plans against the Soviet Union, because they cement the commitment of the US to defend White Australia. Their fear that US power is weakening translates into a desire to be even more use­ful as a lackey, for example strut­ting around as policemen of the South Pacific. Hawke's real foreign minister was never Bill Hayden but George Shultz - wit­ness the recent revelation that he wrote a 1983 Australian defence department statement on nuclear ship visits.

It was the defeat of US im­perialism and its Australian lackey at the hands of social rev­olution in Vietnam that ended the "American century" and cracked the hard chauvinism of Cold War I in Australia. A generation of youth took to the streets bearing

Sydney Waterside Workers Federation Hall, 17 May 1985: 250 workers gathered in solidarity with Vietnamese Revolution, prepared to defend Vietnamese Embassy official (on podium) against Vietnamese fascists.

the flag of the National Liber­ation Front; wharfies and seamen initiated strikes and bans in defence of Vietnam. This class polarisation opened opportunities for building a revolutionary party with a perspective of breaking the working class from Laborite chauvinism to an internationalist solidarity with social revolution in Asia.

FOR A MULTI-RACIAL REVOLUTIONARY WORK~RS PARTY!

that you can now watch SBS TV and enjoy drinking wine and eating a wide variety of decent food. More importantly it has created a working class that at least is heavily immigrant, with the im­migrants concentrated in less skilled, lower paid, more danger­ous jobs. Less tied to the craftism and class collaboration of the Laborite trade union bureaucracy, immigrant workers will be in the forefront of a class struggle up­surge. The Ford Broadmeadows strike in 1973 was an example -just as the fake-communist bu­reaucrat Carmichael thought he had a sellout all wrapped up, the anger of the largely migrant workers exploded and they tried to tear him apart, along with the Ford factory itself.

But the obstacle to class struggle and the main conduit of racism into the working class is the same ALP that once pro­claimed White Australia the num­ber one plank in its platform. Earlier this year at a meeting of Labor MPs, one of them ventured the opinion that the ALP had been

:;:: formed to help the poor and the ~ weak. Gareth Evans, now the ; foreign minister, shot back: "Bull­~ shit. It was formed to keep out ~ the 'yellow hordes'" (rYdney

Morning Herald, 17 May. And some of them are proud of it. Sydney Radio Station 2KY, owned and managed by the NSW Labor Council, only sacked their ugly racist announcer, Ron Casey, after months of public uproar. Four months later he was rehired, and left wing delegates in the Labor Council were taunted with chants of "Casey's back! Casey I s back!" The trade union bureauc-racy fosters vi triolic anti-Japanese protectionism which fuels racism. Early this year a protectionist demonstration of Geelong cement workers against Japanese cement imports, organ­ised by the union bureaucrats in league with the bosses in Melbourne, ended up in attacks on a busload of Japanese tourists. And in the mines, chauvinist pro­tectionism has been used by the "left" Miners Federation leader­ship of John Maitland and Co to suppress any class struggle against job losses, mine closures and give­backs - which they then blame on the Japanese coal importers. Pro­tectionism and racism mean de­fea t for the working class.

Yet it I s these very ALP tops

of Asians admi tted to this country, the Vietnamese are the anti-communist exception to the White Australia rule. If there had been Indonesian "boat people" following the massive anti­communist massacres there in 1965 the Australian navy would have blown them out of the water. The bourgeoisie has its side; they collect counterrevolutionary riff raff from all over the world. The working class must demand the right of asylum for all victims of reactionary terror, be they Iran­ians fleeing Khomeini, Tamils from Sri Lanka, Fijian Indians, op­positionists from Malaysia and Singapore - No Deportations!

The bourgeoisie's post-war immigration program has amelior­ated the cultural philistinism of British Australia somewhat, so

and union bureaucrats who are championed by the left as op­ponents of racism. A recently formed Coalition for Multicul­turalism and Democratic Rights in

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 1988

Mitchel I Library

Melbourne, supported by 14 leftist and immigrant groups ranging from Eurocommunists to Stalinists and Maoists, turned its first public meeting over to a platform for the ALP. A Spartacist speaker from the floor received a round of applause when he said, "You can I t even begin to combat the racism being bred today if you do not start with a hard class opposition to the government of the day -the Hawke Cold War govern­ment." The reformists are all immersed in Laborism, glorifying the history of the Labor Party and peddling the myth of a progressive Australian na tionalisrn. In the midst of the racist furore, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) headlined in Direct Action, "Racists in Retreat"! They have swallowed the liberal "multi­culturalism" myth hook, line and sinker, and really believe White Australia is a thing of the past. The various "unity" manoeuvres of the pro-Moscow SodaUst Party and the S-w P include the iv'\aoist CPA(M-L), whose Vanguard runs racist headlines referring to "Jap imperialism." The political bandits of the Socialist Labour League have put new words (for them) to paper lately in Workers News, "Down with racism, protectionism and na tionalis~n!" but in practice they always turn to the racist, protectionist, nationalist union tops and ALP to carry out their program - up to and including the formation of a workers govern­ment! Moreover, for years the SLL ignored the race question, and exploded vitriolically in re­sponse to our article "Life in a Remote White Imperialist En­clave" (Australasian Spartacist no 101, April 1983), contemptuously dismissing our attacks on Laborite racism as a "jaundiced middle class view of the working class" (Workers News, 25 June 1983).

It will take a socialist revol­ution to racially integrate Aust­ralia, sweeping away a ruling class that despises the rest of Asia and increasingly hates the sight of its own population. In the absence of a thoroughly internationalist multi-racial Bolshevik party, mo­bilisations of the working class can be diverted into reactionary channels by the poisonous influ­ence of Laborism. The only way out for workers, immigrants, blacks and women lies in building such a revolutionary party, through splitting the ALP I S work­ing-class base from its White Aus­tralia capitalism-loving tops, in the struggle for a racially inte­grated workers republic of Australia, part of socialist Asia .•

5

Turmoil at the Top in Gorbachev's Russia

erils 0 erestroiK8 The article below, focussing on the late June special conference of the C PSU, is reprinted from Workers Vanguard no 458 (29 July) biweekly organ of the Spartacist League/US.

For decades the stage-managed congresses of the Com­munist Party of the Soviet Union were viewed as non-events both in Russia and abroad. But for a few days in late June political people around the world were engrossed by the 19th CPSU conference. It was the first special conference in 47 years. Moscow News (17 July) headlined, wTthmore than a little overstatement, "Four Days That Shook the W orid" - recalling John Reed's book on the Russian Rev­olution of October 1917. After six decades of heavy-handed suppres­sion, this clash of contending viewpoints in full view of the Soviet population must seem like a revolution. But al though "bureaucracy" was endlessly con­demned, CP leader Mikhail Gorbachev's program of ~sn9~!. (openness) and ~~est.!oika (re­structuring) is no answer to the deepening crisis of Soviet society engendered by Stalinist misrule.

A few weeks before the con­ference, the editor of the official Communist Youth publication Y ouns. 0a~<,!, who had been named a delegate, addressed a meeting of his supposed constitu­ents. But it was not a happy oc­casion for Anatoly Ivanov, who was raked over the coals merci­lessly as an unreconstructed Stalinist and opponent of ~ stroika. Atone point the 59-year­o{cI''i'youth editor" exclaimed, "I am near retirement. Don't worry. II When Ivanov finally fled the meeting in his black Volga sedan, an older worker who hap­pened to be there said, "You know, after such a meeting in the Stalin period, half of them would have gone .••• II And he whistled in the direction of Siberia. This encounter between the hidebound bureaucrat and his ~~1]9~!.-

Soviet leader Gorbachev (bottom, right) with perestroika point man Yakovlev and "hardliner" Ligachev (left) at CPSU 19th Party Conference, June 1988. minded "comrades" says a lot about the sharpening tensions in Gorbachev's Russia ••• and the widespread fear of a return to the dark, not-so-distant past.

When Gorbachev originally called the conference over a year ago, it was expected to be a triumph for "political ~~estr9ika" with his people replacing the holdovers from the Brezhnev era on the Central Committee. But the conservative ~ara!~hiks countermobilized effectively. Many prominent intellectual sup­porters of ~~':>~Ioi!<a were con­spicuously not selected as dele­gates. The Gorbachevites were enraged and embittered. Across the USSR, from Leningrad to Magadan, thousands marched in front of Communist Party head­quarters crying "we was robbed" in the delegate elections. In Yaroslavl, marchers carried

banners declaring, "Comrade re­gional committee: We're for ~~estr_(?.ika! How about you?" In Omsk, 7,000 jammed the Dynamo soccer stadium to protest local party leaders imposing their can­didates. In Moscow's Pushkin Square, the unofficial clubs Civic Dignity and Commune staged a demonstration carrying red flags with the hammer and sickle and chanting II All Power to the Soviets! II

These are not the anti­Communist protests of a few hundred pro-Western "dissidents" trumpeted by the imperialist press. Yet neither do they rep­resent a revolutionary opposition to the ruling Stalinist bureauc­racy. The "soviets" that the Gorbachevites want to "empower" have nothing to do with the revol­utionary workers councils of 1917; today these are simply

rubber-stamp legislative bodies. As Business Week (27 June) put it, "Gorbachev- I'iots an End Run Around the Party Bureaucrats," by giving greater weight to the government and technocratic bureaucracy. But with thousands protesting in the streets, vocifer­ously debating what were pre­viously closely guarded "affairs of state," this could awaken expec­tations that the Kremlin rulers cannot fulfill. And if behind the "Leninism" preached by the bureaucracy as the ideological straitjacket of Stalinist rule the Soviet working people rediscover what the living Lenin really fought and stood for, the result will be explosive.

Yet amid all this ferment the decisive social force in the Soviet Union - the working class - has not ~ entered the political fray. And this is not accidental. Pere­stroika is an anti-working class program, aiming to overcome the "years of stagnation II under Brezhnev through speedup, mass layoffs, inflation and cutbacks in social programs. For the most part the Gorbachevite intelligent­sia - Russia's yuppies - deeply resent the working class with its egalitarian values and commit­ment to economic security. On the other hand, the conservative aptaratchiks want above all to de end 111e- rigid control of the bureaucratic elite (the nomen­klatura) over all aspects o£Sociaf me. The Soviet proletariat is too socially powerful, the issues at stake affect it too directly for the working class to remain passive.

For all the rhetoric about "openness," "soviet power" and "revol utionary change," what all wings of the bureaucracy seem to be squabbling about is who gets more from whom, completely lacking ~_ sense of the inter­nationalist foundations of the Soviet state. The technocrats want to screw the workers, the petty profiteers want some easy rubles, the workers and collective farmers rightly want to hold on to

Podlesnov/Moscow News

Pro-Gorbachev demonstrators mobilize outside party headquarters in Irkutsk Cleft) and Moscow City Soviet protesting selection of delegates for party conference and demanding green light for glasnost.

6 AUSTRALASIAN SPARTACIST

the far-from-extravagant living standards they already have. Within the Soviet proletariat there is a deep reservoir of egalitarianism, legacy of the 1917 Revolution. But "socialism in one country" - the program of Stalin and Bukharin (as well as Krush-· chev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev)­is a cruel hoax. The interests of the Soviet masses can only be advanced through a program of world socialist revolution~ cre­ating the basis for an inter­national planned economy and eliminating the deforming pres-

. sure exerted on the Soviet state through imperialist encirclement.

Rather than a return to the soviet democracy and revolution­ary internationalism of the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky, Gorbachev's bureau­cratic "reform" aims in the op­posite direction, toward greater concessions to the imperialists abroad and undermining socialist gains at home. What's needed is a genuine poli tical revolution of the proletariat of all the Soviet peoples to oust the stultifying bu­reaucratic caste whose continued domination endangers the home­land of October. Above all, that requires the leadership of a Leninist-Trotskyist party capable of defending and extending the gains of the first workers revolution in history.

TURMOIL AT THE TOP, FRA YING AT THE FRINGE

The fissures in the Kremlin oligarchy were displayed quite openly at the conference. Gorbachev lashed out at his con­servative opponents for their "un­disguised attempts at perverting the essence of the reform." A delegate from the Urals caused an uproar by calling for the resig­nation of longtime Soviet leader Andrei Gromyko, who as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet is the titular head of the USSR. The influential "reform" economist Leonid Abalkin asked rhetorically, "Can we, while retaining the Soviet organization of society and one-party system, ensure a democratic organization of social life?" In response, Gorbachev chastised his advisor for lack of faith in the Communist system.

The delegates were also treated to the long-awaited pol­itical fistfight between Boris Yeltsin and Yegor Ligachev, dar­ling of the conservative ~arat­ch~ks. The pugnacious Yeltsin was ousted as Moscow party boss last fall for pushing the reform line too far, too fast. When Reagan visited Moscow this May, Yeltsin called a press conference and told Western reporters that Ligachev, head of the party apparatus, was a closet opponent of ~~..s~.!:..oika and should be dumped. Yeltsin ap­pealed to the conference: "Re­habilitation after 50 years has now become habitual.... I am asking for political rehabilitation while I am alive" (New York Times, 2 July). For now, he-didn't get it. Ligachev hit back, calling Yeltsin a "destructive force" who considers "the work of the party and the people is in vain."

Overall, Gorbachev performed a careful balancing act, seeking to raise himself in bonapartist fashion above the contending bu­reaucratic factions. As it turned out, the conference was not a triumph for the conservatives, nor

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 1988

was it a setback for Gorbachev. The main proposals coming out of the conference are for a new "strong" president on the Ameri­can or French Gaullist model and for a mammoth super-parliament combining the bureaucratic "soviets" with representatives of (presumably pro-Gorbachev) mass organizations. The stated purpose is to provide some mechanism to energize or sidestep the notori­ously sluggish party apparatus. While the top levels of the party and state bureaucracies (the nomenklatura) closely overlap, lower down many government officials are non-party intellec­tuals and technocrats who are Gorbachev's people.

and Gorbachev and a large banner saying "Socialism, Not Stalinism." The police couldn't figure out who they were and so let them alone. Meanwhile, in the Georgian town of Gori - Stalin's birthplace - copies of Anatoli Rybakov's Children of the Arbat, a powerful novel about the 'Onset of Stalin's terror ,are being burned by youth­ful Stalin-worshippers.

The most dramatic and explos­ive political unrest has been in the Caucasus and Baltic regions. In February violent national conflict erupted between Armenians and Azerbaijanis over the status of the Nagorno-Karabakh Auton­omous Region. Since then scores of people have been killed in

Armenians demonstrate in Moscow. Program of perestroika heightens national tensions in USSR.

No doubt, Gorbachev is also seeking to protect himself from Krushchev's fate, that is, being ousted by his colleagues in the party leadership. (Ligachev point­edly reminded the conference that Gorbachev was installed with his and Gromyko's support.) But set­ting up a bonapartist president and a parliament aping the cor­rupt bourgeois talk-shops of West Europe is hardly a step toward genuine soviet democracy.

The turmoil at the top of the Kremlin hierarchy has spread to the intelligentsia and national re­publics of the Soviet Union. In the weeks leading up to the confer­ence, the tiny self-styled Demo­cratic Union (some of whose leaders are funded by the notori­ous CIA conduit, the National En­dowment for Democracy) staged demonstrations in central Moscow raising the slogans "Down with tyranny!" "Down with the KGB!" On one occasion another "unof­ficial" group also turned up, carrying portraits of Marx, Lenin

Autoworkers meeting in V AZ auto plant in T ogliatti. Perestroika means speedup, layoffs for working class.

communalist rioting, while Armenia was paralyzed by mass protests and strikes. These pro­tests were suspended for the party conference. But when the confer­ence failed to satisfy the Armenian demands, the protests resumed with even greater fury. One person has been killed and over 30 injured in violent clashes between Soviet army troops and demonstrators trying to shut down the airport of Armenia's capital, Yerevan. In response, an emerg­ency session of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR was called which on July 18 rejected the Armenian claim for Nagorno-Karabakh.

The decision was announced in a three-hour TV broadcast of the Supreme Soviet debate, with Gorbachev reading the riot act to the Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders for fostering national rancor. In response, more than 200,000 protestors flooded the center of Yerevan, shouting down Armenian CP leader Suren

Arutyunyan every time he tried to speak. As we go to press, tens of thousands continue to demon­strate every night. Nagorno­Karabakh, which was paralyzed by a general strike for two months, is under virtual martial law, with Soviet troops searching cars and trucks for weapons. Typesetters for the paper ~~vets~ Kar2.bakh refused to publish the central government's decision. At the same time, Moscow ordered the deportation of Paruir Airikyan, a prominent Armenian nationalist agitator, who was simultaneously stripped of Soviet citizenship.

Nationalist agitation has also hit the Baltic republics. The CIA's "Captive Nations" crowd has long dreamed of counterrevol­utionary dismemberment of the Soviet Union. Last month thou­sands marched through Riga sing­ing the Latvian national anthem and carrying flags of the bour­geois independent Latvian state of the interwar years. In neighboring Estonia the Gorbachevite intelli­gentsia has set up a non-party "People's Front," which on June 17 organized a mass rally of 150,000 around the demand for complete economic autonomy. Originally proposed by sociologist Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a leading in­tellectual light of ~~.?!!_~L~~ such organizations can easily slip out of the control of the Kremlin. In reality, the People's Front is a front for resurgent nationalism. They march behind the flag of the interwar Estonian republic, which outlawed Communists, barred Jews from the universities with the numerus clausus, and was a bast{on of White Guard reaction.

That resurgent nationalism in the Baltic republics and also Armenia drapes itself in the mantle of ~~st!oik'!. is not simply protective coloration. The Bal tic region and Armenia are the most economically and culturally advanced regions in the Soviet Union. In the past, centralization from Moscow (despite Great Russian chauvinism) has tended to act as a national equalizer. Now these regions hope to use econ­omic decentralization and market competition as a lever to gain at the expense of more backward areas. When the Armenia crisis erupted, we wrote:

"Except where it serves as a cover for capitalist counter­revolution, we support the right of national self-determination for the various Soviet peoples -ie, the right to secede and form a separate state. And we do not regard as sacrosanct the in­ternal national boundaries of the USSR, which the Kremlin

Continued on page eight

Union Sovietica 7

Perils of Perestroika ••• Continued from page seven

bureaucracy has arbitrarily fixed. " - "Behind the Armenia Crisis,"

Workers Vanguard no 450, 8 April

But by intensifying national div­ISlOns and inequalities, Gorba­chev's perestroika is stoking the fires of nationalist antagonism.

THE ANDREYEV A LETTER What a year or so ago seemed

a shading of opinion wi thin the Soviet leaders:1ip has become a hardening rift. The evident differ­ences between Gorbachev and Ligachev are narrow. The No 2 party leader does not criticize Gorbachev I s appeasement of Western imperialism, from dis­armament to Afghanistan to Angola. He has repeatedly de­clared his support for market­oriented economic reforms, though perhaps less sweeping and rapid than Gorbachev would have it. The battle lines have been drawn instead over glasnost. It is here that Ligachev has set the terms of engagement. Yegor Ligachev is no old-line Stalinist, nor a stodgy holdover from the Brezhnev era. Like Gorbachev, he was elevated into the Kremlin hierarchy from the provinces in the early '80s by the late Yuri Andropov. Ligachev won favor with the austere Andropov because he was reputedly the only partv first secretary in a major city (Tomsk, in Siberia) who did not take bribes.

Ligachev is worried that glas­nost could go - is going - too far. Beginning early last year he began hammering at historians who were exposing Stalin I s monstrous crimes: "Weare for an honest and open look back, but we are decis­ively against the falsification of our glorious past and against the portrayal of our history as a series of continuous mistakes and disap­pointments." Accentuate the posi ti ve, he instructed Soviet his­torians: "the 70 years since the October Revolution have been above all a period of the triumph of socialist construction" (New York Times, 24 March 1987). Last fall he publicly criticized the two most vocal advocates of Gorbachev ' s line, Moscow News and Ogonyok.

The boldest move - by Ligachev I s people to scuttle &~s­nost was the "Andreyeva letter." In mid-March a lengthy tract, os­tensibly written by a Leningrad chemistry teacher but reportedly edited by Ligachev, appeared in the official newspaper of the

8

l~~A.~!!,~!~!I~ :. IlIUriltii,ii'J4ti"'i"ljii?i16i,iimmttttjl

Return to the Road of Lenin and Trotsky!

PAGE 4

Demonstrators in Tallinn raise flag of interwar bourgeois Estonian republic, viper's nest of anti-Semitism and fascism.

Russian republic, Soy.!':.tskaya heirs, the present Kremlin bu­Ro.?.~,!. The "Andreyeva letter" reaucracy. To date, most of the was a hysterical diatribe denounc- attacks on Stalin come from neo­ing "Glasnost, openness, the dis- Bukharinite intellectuals and appearance of zones off limits to outright supporters of "Western­criticism," as "'prompted' in one style democracy," rather· than degree or another by Western from partisans of authentic radio stations or by those of our Bolshevism. The Gorbachev fellow countrymen who are not regime tries to distinguish the steadfast enough in their under- "good" Stalin of the 1920s-early standing of the essence of social- '30s from the "bad" Stalin there­ism." It defended Stalin as one of after. Thus at the recent party the "trail-blazers of socialism" conference top Kremlin aide worthy of "honor and dignity." Georgi Arbatov, arguing for a ten­Ligachev's supporters in the ap- year limit on holding high party paratus made sure the "Andreyeva office, opined that if only Stalin letter" was reprinted in every re- had retired in 1934 - before the gional newspaper in the USSR. (The East German Stalinists also printed it.)

Not coincidentally, both Gorbachev and his chief lieuten­ant, Aleksandr Yakovlev, were out of the country at the time. For three weeks the Gorbachevite in­tellectuals were paralyzed by this attack on them, orchestrated from the Kremlin corridors of power. When Gorbachev returned from abroad, he moved quickly and effectively to defend his base. Cgachev was called onto the car­pet and stripped of his position as ideological overseer. A reply to the "Andreyeva letter," report­edly written by Yakovlev, was printed in Pravda and reproduced with ritucir-self-criticism in Sovetskaya Rossiya. Now the Soviet press officially declared: "Democratism is impossible with­out the freedom of thought and speech, without an open and broad clash of opinions •••• "

The core of the "Andreyeva letter" is the question of Stalin. And for good reason. Exposing Stalin as a psychopathic mass murderer, an enemy of socialism and the Soviet people, calls into question the legitimacy of his

English Edition

SPARTACIST No 41-42, Winter 1987-88

(64 Pages)

$1.50 Spartacist is sent to all Australasian Spartacist and Workers Vanguard subscribers

Mail/make dleques payable to: Spartacist ANZ Publishing Co, GPO Box 3473, Sydney 2001.

Leon Trotsky, co-leader of

October Revolution and founder of

Red Army, waged interna tionalist

fight against Stalin's "socialism in one

country."

Kirov assassination, which trig­gered the bloody purges of all the Old Bolsheviks, loyal Stalinists in­cluded - Russia would have been spared so much suffering!

The Gorbachevite intelligent­sia looks back not to the Russia of Lenin and the October Revolution, but to the Russia of Bukharin and Stalin and the New Economic Pol­icy (NEP), when the bureaucratic degeneration had already reversed the revolutionary course of the Soviet state. They identify them­selves with the "red professors," ~~~ (technocrats) and Nepmen (petty entrepreneurs) of the 1920s. They see both Trotsky and

5talin disturbing their peace, comfort and social advantages. Trotsky represented the prolet­arian internationalist response to the pressures of world imperialism on the weak Soviet state -seeking to optimize what they had through industrialization while promoting workers revolution in the capitalist West. Stalin, under the watchword of "socialism in

~ one country," represented the bu­~ reaucratic-nationalist response to g the pressures of world capitalism • ~ . The Bukharinite Right tried to -i ignore and deny those pressures, 3 (1) (Jl

and so advocated a program that would have led to the destruction of the USSR (though this was not their intent). How could the Soviet Union have defeated Nazi Germany if industrialization had proceeded, in Bukharin' s phrase, "at a snail's pace"? Of course, history cannot simply be reversed: today the Soviet Union is a great industrial and military power. What then does a neo­Bukharinite program mean in the late I 80s? An attempt to increase the economic and social weight of the intelligentsia at the expense not only of the party ~~atchiks but also the working class. It means raising the incomes of the educated petty bourgeois, shifting economic power to factory man­agers and technocrats in the name of market competition, promoting a new class of petty entrepren­eurs, and even decollecti vizing agricul ture.

STALINISM, PERESTROIKA AND THE WORKING CLASS

Alongside the Ligachev offens­ive against .&~snost in the press and intellectual life, there is pass­ive resistal)ce to perestroika in the economic sphere. The reforms in the name of enterprise "self­financing" have been undercut· and even sabotaged by the bureauc-

racies of the industrial ministries who use state orders (which have priority) to try to retain their old control over the enterprises. The resul t of this turf war has been a kind of bureaucratized economic anarchy. At the conference, the director of a machine building factory was heavily applauded when he attacked the endless forms and reports, demagogically thundering: "You've got to kill the people producing them." He also illustrated how ~troika threatens central planning and the state monopoly of foreign trade­fundamental conquests of the October Revolution - remarking: "To tell you the truth, we don't need ministries. We earn our own feed. We earn our own hard cur­rency. What can they give us? Nothing."

In terms of their economic im­pact on the working class, Gorbachev's policies represent not de-Stalinization but in many respects a re-Stalinization widening income differentials be-

AUSTRALASIAN SPARTACIST

tween managers/technocrats and workers, between skilled and un­skilled labor, reintroducing piece rates. The labor policies of ~restroika are strikingly remi­niscent of Stalin's anti­egalitarian campaigns. The 18th Party Conference in 19~1

decreed: "We must liquidate completely the rotten practice of egali­tarianism in wages and must 'achieve the objective of making out of the piecework and bonus system the most important fac­tor of the struggle for increased labor productivity ••.•

- quoted in Zakonodatelstvo 0

trude:kom rrle-ntarii ---(Mosc-ow, 1947)

Compare this with the principal archi tect of E.~estroika, Abel Aganbegyan: "we want to start now to end the general levelling process which developed in the past and to introduce well­founded differentials in wages de-pendent on results" (The Econof"!:!!£ Chal}_eng~ .()f E.~roika [ 1988] ).

When Stalin died in 1953 prac­tically the entire industrial pro­letariat was on piece rates and almost a third on "progressive" piece rates. This meant that their wages increased and decreased more than their output. The harsh labor discipline and extreme in­egalitarianism of the Stalin era fueled potentially explosive work­ing-class discontent. Thus Stalin's heirs moved to rapidly improve the condition of Soviet workers. Investment was shifted from heavy industry to consumer goods. Income differences between pro­duction workers and managers/ technocrats were narrowed con- u..

sider ably. By the end of the Khrushchev period in the mid-1960s, little more than half of production workers were still on piece rates, while "progressive" piece rates had been eliminated completely.

While the Brezhnev regime cracked down on dissident intel­lectuals, it continued and deepened the "soft" line toward the workers. In fact, this was probably the major factor accounting for the exceptional internal stability of Brezhnev' s 18-year reign. By the late '70s Soviet workers were guaranteed a job and a modest standard of living without having to work very hard for it. Now all this is threatened. A piece in the New York Times (lO May) noted how workers see the effect of peres­troika as attacks on their basic rights to housing, job security and medical care. It described a recent "Soviet-style layoff" at the port of Ilyichevsk on the Black Sea, complaining it could only be carried out "according to the rules of the social contract, keeping the people who needed the jobs, not the people the company needed most." Soviet workers find mass unemployment so inconceivable that many literally do not believe the conditions of homelessness and despair which are rampant in American and other Western cities.

Now, to overcome the econ­omic stagnation, the Kremlin bu­reaucracy under Gorbachev wants to use the whip of market compe­tition on the workers. To date, Soviet workers appear perplexed and frustrated. Pere~troika, they are told, will overcome the "years of stagnation," leading to in-

AUSTRALASIAN SP ARTACIST

~ October 1917. But in the absence ~ of a revolutionary-internationalist : perspective counterposed to all g- variants of Stalinism, strikes and ~ workers protests could be diverted ::! into support for the Gorbachev re­~ formers promising "democra-

tization" or even for old-line Stalinists using populist dema­gogy. Gorbachev's "self-reform" is an illusion; the bureaucratic apparatus must be shattered, and it is not excluded that in the course of a political revolution sizable sections of the bureauc­racy would split and go over to the side of the proletariat.

SMASH IMPERIALISM THROUGH WORLD REVOLUTION!

Soviet troops leaving Afghanistan (above), paving the way for bloodbath by CIA-backed Islamic fanatics. Below: Soviet Afghan war veterans at memorial for comrades who fell doing their internat~onalist duty.

The current crisis of Stalinist rule in Russia is directly linked to the increasing pressure of US im­perialist militarism - Cold War II. The Gorbachev regime has re­sponded to that pressure with a policy of z!£~al ~t::.aseme.!!.!.. demonstrated most strikingly in the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. This betrayal poses a terrible bloodbath as the CIA's Islamic cutthroats are out to kill every unveiled woman, leftist and modernizing intellec­tual in that country. There are, however, people, in the Soviet Union, especially veterans of the Afghan war, who understand this and do not like Gorbachev' s sell­out. The afghantsy are an increas­ingly vocal force, demonstrating in the streets and reportedly being taken into the Communist Party in large numbers.

creased productivity and Western­ized economic conditions. Yet economic growth is now slower:. and the supply of consumer goods, especially food, is perhaps worse than in the last Brezhnev years. (And economic parasitism, from the black market to prostitution, has reached epidemic proportions, reminiscent of the profiteers who flourished in the late NEP period.) As a result of "self-financing," many enterprises are not able to meet their payrolls on time. A working-class delegate at the re­cent party conference exclaimed:

"Where is perestroika? The situation with food has not changed, except now there are coupons for sugar. Meat is still unavailable, industrial goods have disappeared in some places. Understand me cor­rectly. I do not say all this to build up tension but to express to the delegates the pain that tortures all the workers."

How much longer will Soviet workers endure that pain without protest?

Not all (only most) Gor­bachevite intellectuals are gung ho for "market socialism" and hostile to the interests of the working class. Boris Kagarlitsky, principal organizer of the Feder­ation of Socialist Clubs, has pol­emicized against the "free market" economists like Nikolai Shmelyev. In an article appearing in the West German Arbeiter­kamp"'~ (2 May) he argues: "Cer­tain situations are such that the methods of the market not only don't solve existing problems but conjure up even catastrophic re­suI ts." Kagarlitsky' s own solution is a confused amalgam of liberal Stalinism and syndicalism:

"The democratic character of ,planning can, on the one hand, be attained through a developed system of workers self­management in production -moreover, not only at the factory level but also at the level of factory associations, entire 'firms,' and branches of the economy - it can, on the other hand, be secured by a democratic structure of the state itself."

On the one hand, planning is incompatible with self-manage­ment, whether of individual en­terprises or entire branches of the econom y. If enterprises totally control their own inputs and in­vestment funds then they can re­late to other enterprises only through the exchange of their products on the market. On the other hand, a democratic struc­ture can only be secured through the Soviet working class reassert­ing its political power through or­gans of soviet democracy as in

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II I $1.50 (32 pages)

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Now, even Brezhnev is being presented as some kind of ultra­left adventurer in international affairs. The Gorbachev regime is echoing the Re~anite line that Soviet aggressiveness, not the in­transigence of American imperial­ism, was responsible for Cold War II. This is spelled out in a recent article in Lit~ra~~i!. Gazeta by one Vyacheslav Dashichev, a lead­ing ideologue in Moscow's Insti­tute for Socialist World Economics:

"Weare convinced that the CrISlS was caused mainly by the miscalculations and incom-petent approach of the Brezhnev leadership towards foreign policy. • •• For the West, the expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence reached a critical point when the USSR sent troops into Afghanistan. "

- Man,chester Gua~9jan ~~~§, 29 May

The Gorbachevites are de­nouncing and moving to reverse the few instances when the Brezhnev regime materially sup­ported national liberation and

Continued on page ten

Hungary: "GOUlaSh Communism"

Goes Bus.

For Central Planning Through SOViet Democracy

9

South Korea ••• Continued from page three

protectionist chauvinism at home. South Korea's new unions are

admirably combative but at pres­ent remain narrowly economist in their demands. Yet just to exist requires a direct struggle with the state. Any serious struggle to put an end to the series of brutal dic­tatorships which have ravaged the country since the postwar American occupation must point to a workers revolution and, in turn, to a struggle to smash the Cold War partition of Korea along tile 38th parallel while defending ~~orth Korea against i:nperialism.

from A-bombing China in the Korean War, and reunifying Korea as an American neocolony. Oppo­sition to US imperialism means defense of the Soviet Union as well as North Korea and all the other deformed workers states.

Korea must be reunified through proletarian socialist rev­olution in the South - the only way to smash the generals and chaebols and break the hold of US Tm perialism - and proletarian pol­itical revolution in the North based on workers democracy and internationalism. A unified Korean workers state would have

I an enormous impact on the i ~ Chinese deformed workers state

(j) and on imperialist Japan, which ~" ruled Korea as its colonial master ~ for the first half of the 20th cen-FOR THE REVOLUTIONARY

REUNIFICATION OF KOREA!

The question of reunification has been placed on the center stage of South Korean political life with the militant student pro­tests beginning last June. Univer­sity students planned to march to the Demilitarized Zone (D1\IZ, actually one of the most militari­zed zones on the face of the planet). At Panmunjom they were to meet with a delegation from the North's Kim II Sung Univer­sity to demand co-sponsorship of the Olympics, the ouster of US troops, and reunification of the country.

Special commando unit trains for Seoul Olympics. Spectators had better not make any sudden moves.

tury, and could thus ignite the working classes throughout East Asia.

As the students prepared to march from Seoul's Yonsei Uni­versi ty and ten other campuses, they were surrounded by 60,000 riot police equipped with armor­plated vans shooting rapid-fire tear gas grenades. Courageously, the students fought to break out of the police cordon, hurling rocks, bricks and firebombs while chanting "Down with the military dicatorship!" and "Drive out the Yankees who enforce the partition of our land!" The march to Pan­Inunjom, however, was stopped by the massive use of police-state repression. And when onlookers protested the brutal treatment of the students, police tossed tear gas grenades into the crowds.

A few days later as a sop the Roh regime permitted a thousand studen ts to stage a ceremony near the North Korean border, where they prayed for the reunification of their country. But neither the riot police nor tame pray-ins have dam pened the student movement for reunification. In August South Korea's cam puses were again battlegrounds between Roh' s police and student protesters trying to march to the border.

The Western press and the Seoul regime describe the student

protesters as radical extremists and leftists. However, the pro­testers appear to express liberal illusions in pure, classless "demo­cracy" as well as resurgent Korean nationalism, directed centrally against the United States. The New York Times (10 June) quoted one studentleader:

"Our ul timate goal is not just blind unification, but achieving sovereignty under an inde­pendent regime.... We have realized we can't have true democracy with a regime represented by military force and manipulated by a foreign invasive force - the United States."

Along the same line, the San Francisco Examiner (15 June) quoted-KimJeunggl, who orig­inally proposed the march to Panmunjom:

"The division of our land by superpowers, spearheaded by the United States, has brought immeasurable trials and trib­ulation to our people. We have now reached a point in our history when we ourselves 1lUst get rid of the barbed wire fence that divides our land." That the students are rnarch­

ing against American imperialism is a good thing, and it is true that the US is a barrier to re­unification. However, the Cold War division of Korea is rooted in the class war of world capitalism against the Soviet bureau­cratically degenerated workers state. A nationalist program can neither understand the division of Korea nor mobilize the forces necessary to overcome it. The students' courageous attempt to march to Panmunjom defied the anti-Communist hysteria of

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Seoul's rulers and the US masters. But the students surely wouldn't like North Korea if they ever got there.

The other side of the students' just hatred for US imperialism and its local puppets has been a tend­ency to prettify conditions across the 38th parallel. "Campus bull­etin boards are filled with photo­graphs of life in North Korea, including some of women working in key positions, and messages condemning America," reported the San Francisco Examiner. The relatIve sociaf equalltyforged in the North on the foundation of a collectivized economy contrasts starkly with the filthy rich bosses side by side with extreme poverty in the capitalist South. And the advancement of women is a crit­ical question in Korea, so recently a peasant/feudal society in which women were routinely bought and sold as wives, and where today women workers get paid half their ;nale counterparts' wages.

. Nonetheless, the Democratic People's R.epublic of Korea is a far cry from a workers paradise or an egalitarian society. On the contrary, Kim II Sung & Son run the most grotesque Stalinist regime in the world. Officially proclaimed Great Leader and Sun of tvlankind, Kim has created a personality cult which makes Stalin look like a modest soul. The comparison which comes to mind is the deification of the old Roman emperors. The Great Leader has set out to create a dynasty by naming his son, Kim II Jung - officially known as "the dear leader" - heir apparent. Government workers devote a month a year to studying the writings of Kim & Son, whose con­tributions are elevated far above those of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Little is known about the North Korean economy since the regime publishes no usable economic da tao We do know, however, that much of the scarce foreign ex­change is spent on full-page ads in the Western press glorifying the Great Leader.

..... If South Korea's student nat­ionalists prettify North Korean Stalinism, they view the Soviet Union as the other "superpower" responsible, along with the US, for the division of their country. But such an equation is radically and dangerously false. The Soviet Union is the military/industrial bulwark of all those countries where capitalism has been over­thrown. Only fear of war with Russia prevented US imperialism

- Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No 460,

9 September 1988

Perils of Perestroika ••• Continued from page nine

progressive struggles in the so­called Third W orId. Beginning with the abandonment of Afghanistan, Moscow is now pressuring the left-nationalist government in Angola to agree to the remova.l of the Cuban troops sent there when the South African army invaded that country in 1975-76. Moscow has also offered to cut off all mili tary aid to Sandinista Nicaragua if Washington stops funding the contras. And to pla­cate Washington and Peking, Gor­bache v , s Kremlin is pressuring Vietnam to withdraw its forces from Kampuchea, whose people it saved from the unspeakable horror of Pol Pot. To this end Moscow is threatening to cut back its piti­fully inadequate aid to the Vietnamese, whose incredible her­oism and sacrifice inflicted upon US im perialism the greatest de­feat in its history.

'Where Gromyko was widely known in Western diplomatic circles as ":vir Nyet," now they're calling Gorbachev "Mr Da." But the Kremlin's policy of appease­ment has only emboldened Western imperialism to push for­ward in its ultimate goal of de­stroying the Soviet Union. Harvard Cold War ideologue Adam Ulam writes triumphantly that the Soviet evacuation of Afghanistan represents "what has been a car­dinal goal of American foreign policy at least since 1947 - con­tainrnent and even 'roll-back' of Soviet imperialism" (Los An~~.? Times, 25 May). Believing they have successfully "rolled back" Soviet power in Afghanistan, US rulers will intensify their efforts to roll back Soviet power in East Europe. To this end, as even the New York Times (10 July) now admits-,-- Washington funnels millions to counterrevolutionary Polish Solidarnosc.

For its part, the Kremlin bu­reaucracy, forged under Stalin, opposes any perspective for pro­letarian revolution to destroy Western imperialism from within. Indeed, the ideological triumph of Stalin is so complete that the pre­sent-day Soviet intelligentsia take "socialism in one country" for

AUSTRALASIAN SPAR T ACIST

SL Protest ••• Continued from page twelve

Florrimell pointed out that the working class is key: "The organ-. ised social power of the working class must be brought to bear in this situation. What that means is when Greiner's storm troops marched into black Redfern two and a half weeks ago swinging their batons there should have been thousands of decent working class men and women on the streets there, to put this govern­ment on notice that they would tolerate no more of this racist terror. The Hawke government has been busting the working class' unions, they've been de­stroying thousands of their jobs and driving their living standards into the ground - to enrich the

. Bonds, the M urdochs, and also in . order to regiment this country to

play its role in US imperialism's crazed drive to war against the Soviet and Vietnamese workers states. The working class must and can be organised around an understanding that an attack on one section of the oppressed is an attack on all. The ruling class might be white, and they might like to keep this country very white, but the working class is very heavily immigrant. They have no interest in defending this white racist capitalist state. The main obstacle to that necessary fight by the working class is the trade union bureaucracy who owe their allegiance to the ALP and the imperialist state which it administers."

BLACK NATIONALISTS/WHITE LIBERALS MOBILISE: TO STOP PROTEST!·

Ray McCann, a small-time black nationalist demagogue and announcer with community Radio Redfern, along with Radio Skid Row, reportedly devoted days of air time to trying to stop people attending the rally. The SL re­sponded by issuing a "Stop Press" on our leaflet (12 September):

"Last Saturday afternoon, Radio Skid Row broadcast the following: 'It's a r all y to protest against the police riots in Red­fern.... The Spartacist League ha ve gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to criticise and condemn

granted (except for those who are for the restoration of capitalism). All the attacks on Stalin's crimes now being made in the Soviet press and literary works are fo­cused on the national terrain. There is no interest or concern over Stalin's (and Bukharin' s) misleadership which derailed the Chinese Revolution in the mid-1920s; the strangling of the Spanish Revolution in the late 1930s for the sake of friendship with British and French imperial­ism; the disarming of Communist partisans in France, Italy and Greece as part of the Cold War division of Europe.

The deep faith in socialist in­ternationalism which animated their grandparents is totally miss­ing in today' s Soviet intellectuals. This is true even for those who claim to oppose Stalinism in the name of genuine Marxism, from Kagarlitsky to Roy Medvedev. Medvedev has gone from outcast to "Prophet with Honor" (Newsweek, 4 July) under Gor-

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 1988

comments that have been made ~. from Aboriginal community mem- £. bers in the Redfern area about the 0-

riots and the community •••• We :2. don't usually ask you not to su~ port a rally, but when the com­munity comes out and is opposed to ••• well, they haven't come out and been opposed to it, but when a rally is organised without per­mission of the community and when it's organised in direct conflict with what the community is trying to do to sort out their own si tua tion there, then it's something that we don't support.' They concluded, 'give the Spart­acist rally a miss ..•. And that's a message that also comes from Radio Redfern as well ••• firmly expressed this morning.'"

Our Stop Press continued: "Radio Redfern, and the guilty white liberals of Skid Row, with supreme patronising arrogance, act like the new mission keepers who can tell Aboriginals what to do. They agree with those we 'criticise and condemn' for calling for more police in Redfern, and stand condemned for opposing the only rally to date to protest the vicious cop terror. But Redfern Aboriginals know our leaflet tells the truth and have enthusi­astically responded that it's about time someone did something about it. Which is what gets the goat of Radio Redfern/Skid Row, self­appointed 'voice of the Aboriginal community.' Our rally, especially our program of mobilising the working class in defence of blacks against racist state terror, draws a sharp line between those who want to cover up Australian Apartheid and those who want to smash it."

Eveleigh St: Tiny ghetto was brutaIly attacked by cops, 27 August.

In glaring contrast to the de­sire of Redfern Aboriginals to fight to stop cop terror were the strenuous efforts of various black "community leaders," and liberals including the Committee to De­fend Black Rights (CDBR) to pre­vent blacks attending our rally. These self-important reformist "guardians" are reminiscent of the government Protectors, who en­forced apartheid under the "ben­evolent" Aboriginal Protection Acts from 1909 through the sixties. The Protectors, usually cops, forced Aboriginals onto re­serves, took children away from their parents, decided who was

bachev. In his book On Stalin and Stalinism (1979), - Medvedev dismisses Trotskyism as "ul tra­leftism" and the Fourth Inter­national as a quixotic sect. His neo-Bukharinite outlook excludes the possibility of proletarian rev­olution in any Western country. The October Revolution is for Medvedev a historically and nationally unique event, its main value being to lay the basis for the modernization of Russia. Such a nationalist view can only strengthen the ideological hold of imperialism over its own working classes.

For Lenin as well as Trotsky, the Bolshevik Revolution was the first great victory in the world socialist revolution. Soviet workers resisting the effects of perestroika, those who distrust Gorbachev's appeasement of im­perialism, those who fight against Great Russian chauvinism in the name of proletarian international­ism, will find in Trotskyism their own class answer to the corrup-

Aboriginal or not and prevented non-Aboriginals (sometimes paint­ed as communist agitators) from entering reserves. Greg Eatock of the CDBR ludicrously announced at a CDBR meeting on 21 Sept­ember that he considers the SL a "banned organisation" because we ini tiated a protest demonstration "without the permission of the Aboriginal community," by which, of course, he means himself. Coming from people like Eatock, who devoted his speech to wailing that his organisation doesn't get as much government money as was promised, being "banned" for fighting Australian Apartheid is a badge of honour. As for "per­mission from the Aboriginal com­munity," the SYdner Morning Herald (10 September noted: "If the Spartacists, at least, are reg­ulars in Eveleigh Street, the rest of the white visitors are strictly seasonal." In the worst of ugly white Laborite tradition the likes of the CDBR want to ensure that blacks are kept segregated and dependent on the "benevolent," racist state.

Campus leftists were con­spicuous by their absence, as Spartacist activist on campus Chris McCarthy related: "The pseudo-left on this campus, all of whom were invited - the mis­named Students against Apart­heid, Left Action, Resistance, the SRC - they were all asked. They claim they've got more important things to do. Well, they stand ex­posed. The Socialist Labour

tion, economic stagnation and pol­itical cynicism engendered by bureaucratic rule. That answer is proletarian political revolution to oust the Kremlin oligarchy and re­store soviet democracy and socialist economic planning. That answer is the Trotskyist perspec­ti ve of "permanent revolution," including the extension of the Russian October to the advanced capitalist countries of North America, West Europe and Japan.

For a planned economy based on soviet democracy! Soviet his­tory belongs to the Soviet peoples - Open the archives! For uncon­ditional defense of the USSR against imperialism and internal counterrevolution! Taking up the banner of the Bolshevik-Leninist Left Opposition, fighting for a Soviet section of a reforged Fourth International, is the only realistic course which can save the Soviet peoples and all of hu­manity from a nuclear holocaust launched by the decaying capital­ist order .•

League were also approached. They do not consider fighting Australian Apartheid a priority. And that's no surprise. They call on Gerry Hand, Minister for Ab­original Oppression, to form a workers government. The rabidly anti-Soviet International Social­ists were asked. Well, they're not here. That's no surprise either because they're on the wrong side of the class line internationally and at home."

As a Spartacist speaker con­cluded at the rally, "It's a dirty rotten country where the cops can get away with terror against Ab­originals just one mile from this university and no one wants to do anything about it except the communists. It's not just Redfern's problem, it's the prob­lem of all the oppressed of this country that cops are allowed to get away with this. We fight for full social equality for blacks and minori ties and for revolutionary integrationism to smash Aust­ralian Apartheid. We seek to build a revolutionary internationalist workers party, brushing aside the capi talist-Ioving misleaders of the working class and bringing together all of the oppressed under the leadership of the work­ing class vanguard. We ha ve the program to overthrow this vicious capitalist state and to replace it with a workers state, part of a socialist Asia. Students who want to fight on the side of the op­pressed and fight for a socialist future should join us." •

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11

~ Australasian------....

5 PARTACIST For Mass Labour/Black MObili'sations to Stop Racist Terror!

Apartheid-style Cop Assault on Redfern Blacks

We reprint below a Spartacist League leaflet dated 7 September, distributed at Sydney University and in Redfern.

"It was like South Africa, it was like a war. It seemed like the police were on a practice run and didn't care who they hurt," said a Redfern resident, describing the outrageous cop assault on the small Aboriginal community in the Eveleigh Street ghetto in Redfern. Just after midnight on 27 August, on the sham pretext of chasing a' bag-snatcher, approximately 50 baton-wielding racist cops ma­terialised within minutes, led by the brutal TRG (Tactical Re­sponse Group). They charged in military formation through the backyards of Eveleigh St where residents congregate, bashing and trampling bystanders, kicking and choking anyone within reach. Amongst those injured was 'vlargret Campbell, Sydney Col­lege of Advanced Education lec­turer. The cop assault was eventually beaten back by cour­ageous blacks defending them­selves and their own.

Pamela Ingram, who watched the attack from her home, said "They (the cops) have been build­ing up to this, provoking us by coming in here all the time, grabbing people and harassing us. I reckon this was a set up .••• " (Sun Herald, 28 August) Four blacks, including Aboriginal Legal Service officers who intervened to get the cops to withdraw, were arrested. Cops began sifting the film they shot to make further arrests. State Attorney-General John Dowd announced proposed changes to the Summary Offences Act,

explicitly to make it easier to jail blacks. The Police Association petitioned the Greiner govern­ment for 24-hour TRG patrols in Redfern. The Greiner government says it was the blacks' fault. Bull­shit! It was an organised Apart­heid-style cop assault. Some prominent local Aboriginals, like Cheryl and Tony Mundine, backed the government's line and blamed the community, organising meet­ings in collaboration with the cops to push for more police liaison of-

Spartacist Protest The Spartacist League held a

protest rally at Sydney University on 14 September against the Apartheid-style cop assaul t against Redfern Aboriginals on 27 August. The rally demanded "Cops out of Redfern! Drop the charges!" and called for building labour/black mobilisations to smash racist terror. The rally was attended by about 30 people, and some 50 or so students sat further away and listened to the speeches. Our chants, induding "Ruxton, G'Irland, RSL: Shove your Nazi lit ood tes ts and go to hell!" rang across the grounds of this eli tist institution. Our leaflet was well-

12

received by Redfern blacks, who welcomed our action, as did many students appalled by the violent cop assault. The atrocity took place not in South Africa, or even some isolated outback town, but in the heart of Australia's biggest city. As in 1983 over the acquittal of the cop murderers of John Pat, the Spartacist League was alone on the left in protesting the racist state terror, a demonstration of our commitment to working class action in defence of the em­battled Aboriginal people.

Trade union militant and Spartacist supporter Neil

Continued on page eleven

o +­o .C­o..

rn Q) (Jl

-+ (1) .., :J

::r: (1) .., [l)

0.

The face of Australian Apartheid! State terror against Aboriginals is an everyday event in Redfern.

ficers and self-policing: a suicidal, loser policy.

Students, trade unionists, all decent people must protest this VlClOUS state terror against blacks. The Spartacist League has called a rally on the front lawn at Sydney Uni on Wednesday, 14 September at 1 pm to protest this outrage. We demand: Cops out of Redfern! For labour /black/ minority actions to stop racist terror! Drop the charges against Redfern blacks! Students who

want to take a side against the capitalist state must be there.

Racist oppression and apart­heid terror is bipartisan policy. Greiner's TRG were paid for and outfi tted by the ALP government which used them to enforce martial law conditions in Bre­warrina one year ago. For the paramilitary TRG, Redfern is a training ground for assaults against bigger targets, like workers' picket lines. Since the murder of John Pat in 1983 in W A and the subsequent acquittal of the killer cops, the increasing numbers of deaths of black!; in custody have become a sharp signature of the anti-Soviet, union-busting Hawke regime. There will be no justice through the Muirhead Commission cover­up or Hawke's "Treaty" fraud. Alone, the marginalised Ab­original population has no social power. The Spartacist League fights for defending Aboriginals through mobilising the power of organised labour against state terror. The union tops mouth off about defence of Aboriginals but, when blacks stand up and defend themselves, they're either no­where to be seen, or on the other side like the Teachers Federation leaders were over the Cleveland St High expulsions. The fight for full social equality for blacks, ie, revolutionary integrationism, means building a revolutionary workers party, forged in the struggle to split the ALP's work­ing-class base from its racist pro-capitalist tops. To smash Australian Apartheid, it will take a thoroughgoing socialist revolution ••

Spartacist rally at Sydney University, 14 September.

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 1988